So this week’s episode of Girls was the like the only one this season that featured zero nudity. Cause guys, we had no time for superfluous tittays this week. We had really serious stuff to deal with! Shoshanna cheats on Ray with a hunky club-going doorman! Marnie wanders like the ghost of girlfriends past through Charlie’s tech start-up office and embarrasses us all! Jessa is off in the wilds of upstate New York probably cohabitating with grizzly bears, because they’re just so much more raw and real than human beings. And Adam’s new girlfriend is Carole Kane’s fictional daughter. Shit’s gotten literally cray! Like institutionalized, seeing specialists since age seven cray… Because the main focus was Hannah’s up-to-now dormant OCD. But, it’s back!
So our episode begins with Hannah getting a call from Adam on her iPhone, and her making the adult decision to ignore it. Still, this sends Hannah off of the mental health precipice and we meet a new part of our fractured Heroine—Hannah, the counter! She looks over each shoulder eight times. She opens and shuts her door eight times. She lines up 8 Utz potato chips, and forces them into her mouth at once. OMG, she’s so OCD… This is not author’s-life-plagiarism, this is creativity! Because Lena Dunham didn’t just do an interview with Rolling Stone about her childhood obsession with the number 8 and her battle with hypochondria and OCD.
Cut to, the world’s most unlikely couple and their equally unfeasible third wheel. So Ray and Shoshanna are walking around Washington Square Park with Marnie. Marnie, clad in the Midol commercial uniform minus the hoodie, is still reeling from her breakup with artist boyfriend that never was. So she really needed a bubble tea. Because Marnie’s like Job, or something, we learn that Charlie has developed his own mobile app and is now independently wealthy. Eff it all to hell for this girl. This makes Charlie a “bougey nightmare” according to Ray. Unlike the rest of the people in this series, including the guys who wear t-shirts from places to which they’ve never been like “Yogurt Towne,” manage Café Grumpy, and studied comp lit at Oberlin. We’re looking at you, Ray.
Shoshanna runs into, like, the richest Hindi she knows, Radika, who invites our ill-fitted turtledoves to an impromptu soiree. Ray thinks it’s unsuitable for him to attend, because it’s creepy for a 33 year old to attend a college party. But just in case you were gettin’ it twisted, it’s totally kosher for a 33 year old to go out with a college-age girl. Or even a seventeen year old. This is another thing that confirms Ray’s complete lack of self-awareness and his general sense of exceptionalism.
Meanwhile, Marnie slinks away to stalk Charlie, who has built up an entire company in a matter of two week’s time. We join her as she shuffles into his West Elm-furnished office, confused and with flat hair. Seriously, she’s getting to the point that we don’t even dislike her. We just want her to stop giving us embarrassment sympathy pangs. But in these two-to-three weeks since that awkward roof kiss, Charlie has morphed from scruffy post-grad to budding Mark Zuckerberg-ish character. Now he’s in charge of a whole office with Apple machines and cute girls in Dov Charney glasses that ask him to approve mock-ups of new interfaces. And what is the nature of his million dollar app? It’s a program called “Forbid”, which is essentially a firewall against calling exes. And it was inspired by Marnie, of course.
While Marnie is regretting dumping Charlie for questionable and selfish reasons here, I can’t help but feel for her just a little bit in the moment when Charlie calls bullshit on her showing up out of the blue. In kind of a dick move, he insinuates that she just wants a piece of him now for his tech money. While that may be the truth, it’s clear here that the chip Marnie left on his shoulder has made him bitter in a potentially chronic way. He will be forever out to prove to her that he was the winner of their relationship. This will make him a pain in the ass for every girl he dates. But I guess it’s great that he’s developed an app to prevent himself from being a pain in the ass to his exes.
So given that Ray is the dullest dud to ever inhabit dudsville, it’s only natural that Shoshanna makes out with the doorman at the party. And, he’s the third mark on the show’s person of color tally. Also, can we just say that Shoshanna’s attempt to vent to Radika about her general frustration with all of her friends’ crippling narcissism was sort of poignant and sad? I’d love to take her more seriously, because she really is the one person on this show who is not unbearably entitled. Through her ostensible cluelessness, she may just be the wisest of them all. But she’s been whipped into such a bridge and tunnel stereotype that it’s almost impossible to identify with her.
But, back to Hannah. Because this show is all about Lena Hannah anyway. Her parents are in town, and we are reminded again of what a terrible brat she can be. And this makes us remember every time we’ve been shitty to our parents and doesn’t make us feel any better. So we line up 8 more Utz chips on our table and jam them into our facial cavities. Cause it’s how to deal. But of course, the padres see that she’s having an OCD flare-up with the counting thing and are righteously concerned. But their concern drives her even crazier, and she starts two-fisted drinking in front of the two people on Earth who wouldn’t judge her for doing so—her wonderful parents who would send her to multitudinous specialists, so long as she has a hope of getting better.
The really annoying thing about her interaction with her parents isn’t the fact that she’s too proud to accept their help when they give it to her. Because she takes it all willingly– the free dinner, the fancy adult-income friendly outings, and the therapy. But she does so without a shred of gratitude. When she tells her dad–“I hate it when you look so concerned about me” it doesn’t seem like she cares whether her parents are worrying about her—she’s terrified of being viewed as the child she still is, from her playsuits, to her general ineptitude of taking real care of herself. The issue with that is, if you want to be seen as a real adult, you have to start paying for your own iPhone, and drinks, and therapy.
